The Ancient Greeks and Romans knew the key to success, power AND happiness … all you
Stoicism is in. Very much the philosophy du jour. Particularly in the sillier reaches of the manosphere, as it is called: the online world of supposedly manly influencers, ‘buff, greedy and combative’, as Tom Hodgkinson, the author of this book, scathingly puts it.
They tell their credulous followers that via the classical philosophy of the Stoics, they can ‘become successful, masculine . . . make a lot of money . . . date and sleep with a lot of girls’.
Hodgkinson disdains to name the shallow-brained noodle who summarised Stoicism thus (but I think it might be Andrew Tate).
Zeus: King of the Greek Gods
Instead, in this lively, funny and effortlessly educational new guide to the real Stoicism, he asks what the ancient philosophy from Greece and Rome actually taught.
Hodgkinson, incidentally, is the presiding genius behind the Idler magazine and its school of philosophy, which in a nutshell encourages us not to be merely slothful, but to commit ourselves to the things that enrich our lives, rather than resigning ourselves to consumerism or corporate slavery.
Stoicism all began in Athens in 303BC, when a ‘bearded and dishevelled old philosopher’ called Crates smashed a bowl of lentil soup carried by a young Phoenician called Zeno.
The younger man, embarrassed, ran away. Crates called after him that it was really no big deal, why be embarrassed? From that distinctly humble beginning, a whole philosophical tradition was born, with Zeno its founder.
The Stoics taught that we should remain calm in the face of adversity. Trust to Fate, Providence, or God, which are all essentially the same thing.
While we as individuals cannot control the affairs of the wider world – the vast tides of politics, economics, war, or even spilt bowls of soup – we can control, to a large extent, our own response to these externals.
We have sovereignty over our own minds, and nothing else. Yet it’s this one simple truth that we largely neglect. ‘Stop trying to control the things you can’t control, and start controlling the things you can control.’
While today’s online travesty of modern Stoicism appears to be all about winning power over others, the original version is quite the opposite: winning power over yourself. You will thus become not a cold and emotionless stuffed shirt, but rather serene and happy, much like today’s Buddhist or Taoist monks.
Founder: Zeno founded Stoicism in Athens in 303BC
Happiness comes not from without but from within, and you are in charge of within.
It’s an enormous power, a superpower, once you realise it. Hodgkinson quotes a ten-year-old girl he knows, writing about her grandfather. ‘My grandfather is in a wheelchair but he doesn’t mind.’ A perfect summary of Stoicism!
Money, fame and success, on the other hand, have no power to make you happy. Looking at the often tormented lives of today’s rich and famous, you can see how true this is.
But perhaps it’s the ancient view of passion that’s most alien to our own romantic age. Isn’t passion good, thrilling, enriching? For the ancients it was a form of madness. In fact, the Roman Stoic, Seneca, called love even for one’s own wife ‘friendship gone mad’.
A little austere, perhaps. But he insisted that anxiety, rage, misery and even madcap erotic love should be avoided.
Instead, the Stoics had a very high regard for friendship, the key to which they thought was ‘sincerity’.
If you are aiming to be always tranquil, kind and considerate, a friend to all humanity, wild passions like rage or romantic love will ruin your chances.
B eing in love also meant you were enslaved to another, and this undermined the importance of Stoic independence and self-reliance. The nation’s favourite poem is often cited as being Rudyard Kipling’s If, and no more stoical poem could be imagined.
Other Senecan teachings are surely spot on. If ever you feel anger, he said, remain quite still and do nothing. It will pass. Much like the modern advice to ‘count to ten before speaking’.
In the heat of the moment you will say something you regret, or make a stupid decision. A slave to your passion, you are temporarily mad, but do nothing and calm and sanity will soon return.
Perhaps this is why, outside of films and books, where rage can sometimes look noble and dramatic, in real life when someone throws a wobbly and starts screaming (often in a supermarket car park for some reason), they only look deeply silly.
This kind of excess of passion, at least, even we moderns can admit does us no favours at all. The man who stays calm and clear-headed in the face of anger, chaos or danger is, after all, the far more ‘manly’ and capable man.
Fascinatingly, another modern school of thought that fits closely with the teachings of the Stoics is cognitive behavioural therapy, by some margin the most effective form of therapy in the real world for a whole range of conditions.
And again, very Stoically, it essentially means trying to change not the external world – the circumstances in which you live – but how you view these things. Only change your own thoughts and feelings, and you will be far happier.
How To Live Like a Stoic is out now
Much easier said than done, of course. And endearingly, Hodgkinson admits near the end of this delightful book that although he finds Stoicism a great help in life, particularly when troubled, he’s glad he sometimes ignores its teachings altogether.
He recently, when out for the evening with friends, downed a few too many margaritas and ended up in a karaoke bar singing and dancing along to Abba. (‘We’re all in our late 50s, I should add, with grown-up children.’) And he wouldn’t have missed this moment of ‘Dionysian revelry’ for the world.
There’s much to enjoy in this book, endless food for thought, and it’s especially rich in quotations from the originals.
One that really struck me was another observation by Seneca. ‘Liberty does not come for free. If you value it, you must devalue everything else.’
Wise and wonderful.